Well, the satellite remark related to rainforests, specifically, Amazon Rainforests, which would be a bit outside the purview of the US Forestry Service.

Ooops! I read it wrong- thought we were discussing US Forests. You are right- The amazon rainforests are outside the jurisdiction of our forestry department. That falls under the US State Department, Us Foreign Affairs office, CIA and NSA. And they only care about it if there happens to be an oil field there. In which case we may need to install a friendly dictator or two.

There's so much diversity in the Amazon rainforests, though, that if you wipe out one patch you lose some species forever. And generally what grows back in an area that's been clear-cut isn't much like what was growing there before. You get growth, yes, but you only get the most opportunistic species. It takes a long time for the land to recover when it's been completely stripped.

Dead tree books suck because when you get a paper cut and bleed all over the book, you make nice stains that never will fully come out. But if I bleed on my reader, I can just wipe off the blood and continue reading. But then, the only way I'd be bleeding on my reader is a paper cut from a dead tree book.

Why isn't the US Forestry Service doing something about this? I thought that was their job was to keep those logging roads open in our national forests and our National Parks nicely clearcut! I'm going to write my congressman about this dereliction of duty pronto!

I have seen "clearcut" used in two ways, first as complete removal of all trees (the point of your humor) and also as keeping the underbrush clear so that the trees can be healthy and avoid a lot of the fires that start from old dead wood at the base of trees. The latter is of course banned because of the environmentalists resulting in more uncontrollable forest fires each year.

Few remember that as recently as the end of the War of Northern Aggression (1861-1865) the state of Maine was almost completely devoid of trees as they had all been harvested for paper goods, furniture, ship building, housing, heating material, or cleared for farming.

...the state of Maine was almost completely devoid of trees as they had all been harvested for paper goods, furniture, ship building, housing, heating material, or cleared for farming.

I live in the northeast (not in Maine, but quite close to it), and I can tell you that the forests here still have not recovered from the clearcutting you describe. The ratio of hardwood to softwood is entirely different than it was before the arrival of the Europeans, with widespread impacts on the animal populations that depend on the different species of trees and other plant life.

As far as brush clearing goes, on the Eastern seaboard the growth of underbrush itself is largely due to human intervention, according to a very interesting article in National Geographic a couple of months ago. Apparently earthworms are not native to the Americas, and their introduction (largely from the bilge water and plant imports of Europeans) drastically altered the ecosystem. Prior to the introduction of earthworms, leaves and other mast would accrue at the bases of trees, preventing most young growth. Earthworms convert this mast to loam, resulting in the rapid development of undergrowth.

Is the answer to clear brush? In the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states, forest fires are not as common or as fierce as they are in the Western US. I don't know as the answer to one ecological intervention is necessarily another drastic ecological intervention.

That being said, clearcutting strips of forest does provide zones of "edge" growth, which tend to have the greatest biological diversity, at least in alpine forests. These are not simple issues.

To return to our original lighthearted topic, p-magazines are inferior to e-magazines because after a couple of months finding an issue of a p-magazine requires major archeological excavation (if it has not in fact been recycled or used as bird-cage liner), whereas e-magazines can be searched for as long as you care to keep them on your hard drive.